To get the right angle on a review, a Pitchfork reviewer must travel to the ends of the earth. In this case, the ends of the earth is the Der Dritte Raum website. And although the site could be viewed in both english and german, navigating auf deutsch made the experience all the more cosmopolitan.

Here's what I've discovered: Der Dritte Raum ("The Third Room") is German techno DJ Andreas Krueger with a little help from "co- piloten" Ralf Uhrlandt, with two full length albums and a handful of international singles preceding Spaceglider (or, Raumgleiter, as they call it in Germany). But one spin of this record reveals all the pertinent info the average Pitchfork reader needs: Spaceglider is a non- stop affair of squirmy noises played ad nauseum over uninteresting breaks. The music is continuous, though it hardly matters. See, the songs on the album not only display no internal progress, but all sound remarkably identical.

Spaceglider flirts with some of the more exciting things going on in modern squirm and trance, but those explorations never really pan out. The beats are tired and thin, and the bass is sparse and automatic. Falling back on Casiotone flourishes and mechanized Kraftwerk- like pops and twitters makes for robotic dance music, devoid of any cool cerebral experimentation on top and lacking the funk on the bottom. The played- out astronaut imagery merely underlines what the listener already knows-- namely, that Spaceglider is dated and frail. I suppose the bottom line in a techno album review is: can I dance to it? Well, yeah, but do you really want people to see you doing the Robot?

-Brent S. Sirota